Useful Idiot – “Uncle Tom” Friedman

Uncle Tom Friedman has redefined this term to refer to a white Jewish journalist who behaves in a subservient manner to an unpopular black President.Yet we should ask ourselves what is it about Uncle Tom Friedman that makes him so vindictive, so downright nasty and condescending when it comes to Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. I can understand Uncle Tom Friedman’s weakness in everything that concerns Prime Minister Netanyahu. When Uncle Tom was volunteering to pick oranges in a kibbutz, Benjamin Netanyahu followed in the footsteps of his brother Yoni and volunteered to the Sayeret Matkal elite commando unit, where he became an outstanding officer.

So as he sits in his office and writing from his Olympian vantage point in New York, Uncle Tom Friedman preaches the typical elitist liberal diatribe about a moral equivalency between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, “just leave them alone so that both sides can see the error of their ways.” Uncle Tom Friedman has also claimed parallels between the behavior of anti-Obama protestors to that of "extreme right-wing settlers" in Israel before the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. As Uncle Tom has become more despondent that his influence as a columnist and that of his golf partner Barack Hussein Obama have diminished, he has become more and more outlandish in his criticisms of Israel and of Prime Minister Netanyahu in a pathetic attempt to make headlines and get attention.

Uncle Tom Friedman's failure to reckon with the potentially dire consequences of the current campaign to question the right of Israel to exist is indicative of his genuine Useful idiot credentials. Liberals have historically dismissed the need to have all nations held accountable for their actions in addition to their indifference to the notion thatthe "people" think otherwise.Palestinians, at least at the leadership level are a malevolent people who are happy to sacrifice their own citizens, and to make free use of useful idiots in the West, in order to achieve their real goal: not peace and certainly not a two state solution, but the complete dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only last week, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian Authority’s chief peace negotiator with Israel, published an op-ed in Britain’s Guardian newspaper in which he declared eternal war on the Jewish state. This he did by asserting that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that does not permit the immigration of some 7 million foreign Arabs to Israel will be “completely untenable.” I didn’t read an op-ed by Uncle Tom Friedman that the Palestinian Arabs are acting like spoiled children or drunken drivers as he so enthusiastically labeled Prime Minister Netanyahu.Excluding Uncle Tom Friedman, all of us know that Israel is the only country in the world in which her national sovereignty is questioned and has to defend and justify her continued existence.

With the very right of Israel to exist under assault, now might be a good time to remind Uncle Tom Friedman to remind his readers about something that Secretary of State George Shultz stated in 2003 about moving America’s embassy to the capital of Israel, Jerusalem ; “that having our embassy in Tel Aviv makes it seem that we are just “camping out.” A move to Jerusalem would signal: As far as we’re concerned, this state is permanent. It ain’t goin’ anywhere, get used to it.” "Why not move our embassy to West Jerusalem and be done with it? People should do things that say Israel is there to stay." Instead Uncle Tom Friedman demands of Israel to accept unequivocally the division of Jerusalem in coordination with President Barack Hussein Obama.

Uncle Tom Friedman might also want to remind his readers over and over again and over again about the interview with Al Jazeera Editor Ahmed Sheikh, an outspoken supporter and defender of the Palestinian Arabs, who enlightened his viewers with “ The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. The Israeli-Arab conflict, for instance, is not just about borders. Israel's mere existence is a daily humiliation to Muslims, who can't understand how, if they have the superior religion, how Israel can be so powerful. He continues with "It gnaws at the people in the Middle East that such a small country as Israel, with only about seven million inhabitants, can defeat the Arab nation. That hurts our collective ego. The Palestinian problem is in the genes of every Arab."

For many of us who grew up reading “all the news that’s fit to print”, Uncle Tom Friedman, a leading writer for America’s newspaper of record, the author of “the golden arches theory of conflict resolution” (no two countries that have McDonald branches will attack one another) has become the embodiment of the globalization of Uncle Tom, betraying so many of our common sense understandings about truth, integrity, and about being a mensch. Uncle Tom Friedman has proven to us all that by attempting to blame Israel for a host of domestic U. S. problems, and by diverty attention to the overwhelming belief that President Barack Hussein Obama may not right for America, he is not only willingly playing the part of Uncle Tom but setting the stage for President Barack Hussein Obama’s abandonment of Israel.